> What if you remove the branch and nobody has any idea where change 'x' came from or why? If you want to make it clear that the change was from a branch, you

> What if you remove the branch and nobody has any idea where change 'x' came from or why? If you want to make it clear that the change was from a branch, you can merge with --no-ff and you'll have a merge commit. What you call 'rewriting history' is just moving pointers around a tree. Git maintains a non-linear history of development, entirely orthogonal to the concept of branches. This means that for branches with significant amounts of work, you can get a good idea of why there it diverged from master just by inspecting the history. A pointer pointing to the last commit before merge is nice to have, but you don't lose much when you delete it.